he papacy--is alive
still as of old, one and continuous, and still true to itself. Ah!
what is local and visible, as you know, counts for so much with the
artistic temper!

Old friends, or old foes with but new faces, events repeating
themselves, as his large, clear, synoptic vision can detect, the
invading King of France, Louis XII., appears as Attila: Leo X. as Leo
I.: and he thinks of, he sees, at one and the same moment, the
coronation of Charlemagne and the interview of Pope Leo with Francis
I., as a dutiful son of the Church: of the deliverance of Leo X. from
prison, and the deliverance of St. Peter.

I have abstained from anything like description of Raphael's pictures
in speaking of him and his work, have aimed rather at preparing you to
look at his work for yourselves, by a sketch of his life, and therein
especially, as most appropriate to this place, of Raphael as a scholar.
And now if, in closing, I commend one of his pictures in particular to
your imagination or memory,, your purpose to see it, or see it again,
it will not be the Transfiguration nor the Sixtine Madonna, nor even
the "Madonna del Gran Duca," but the picture we have in London--the
Ansidei, or Blenheim, Madonna. I find there, at first sight, with
something of the pleasure one has in a proposition of Euclid, a sense
of the power of the understanding, in the economy with which he has
reduced his material to the [60] simplest terms, has disentangled and
detached its various elements. He is painting in Florence, but for
Perugia, and sends it a specimen of its own old art--Mary and the babe
enthroned, with St. Nicolas and the Baptist in attendance on either
side. The kind of thing people there had already seen so many times,
but done better, in a sense not to be measured by degrees, with a
wholly original freedom and life and grace, though he perhaps is
unaware, done better as a whole, because better in every minute
particular, than ever before. The scrupulous scholar, aged
twenty-three, is now indeed a master; but still goes carefully. Note,
therefore, how much mere exclusion counts for in the positive effect of
his work. There is a saying that the true artist is known best by what
he omits. Yes, because the whole question of good taste is involved
precisely in such jealous omission. Note this, for instance, in the
familiar Apennine background, with its blue hills and brown towns,
faultless, for once--for once only--and observe, in the U